You want people to return - please add housing and

Recently a return to FFXIV promotion started. Good to see these. One significant feature that attracts many people is housing - probably houses more than apartments/fc rooms.

Since you have the housing neighborhoods instanced not open world (as in Vanguard, DAOC etc.) would it take that much to add more neighborhoods? On many servers, and not just the most crowded, plots are rarely available. A housing addition would be a great promotion to encourage returnees.

Another plus would be allowing people that buy an expansion to actually play it after finishing ARR. The 100 MSQ interregnum between ARR and HW is mandatory now and that annoys a lot of people that want to actually get to the new zones/jobs. IMO let people play HW after finishing ARR and play the new one after HW - the interregnum quests are good to keep us busy while waiting but you will sell many more expansions if people can actually jump in and play them.

I believe that it was already announced they would be adding more housing for 4.0. Whether this will be a new area, or expanding the current areas with more wards/plots hasn't been announced yet, but there are plans to. Hopefully, it won't be like the last expansion where they only added 4 wards to the existing housing areas. Didn't really solve much, since housing is still extremely limited. Especially since people have multiple houses still (literally, there is one guy on my server with 4-5 different houses--one for each of his alts, AND for his FC). I'd love it if they would also make the houses shareable/account-wide. That way, my alt can use my main's house.

Also, since the events of 2.x lead up to 3.0 (particularly the 2.5 events), story-wise, that is why they are mandatory, and it has already been announced that 3.x is required to enter 4.0 (since we have already started setting the stage for heading into Ala Mhigo in 4.0 in Patch 3.4. However, the 2.x quests could use some pruning. Get rid of the unnecessary fetch quests, and stick to only those that expand upon the story itself. 3.x still has some fluff to it, but not nearly as much as 2.x. So the devs did learn not to flood the between-expansion patches with unnecessary content--they made them Sidequests instead (Ex., Warring Triad storyline, rather than include it in 3.x like 2.x did the 3 Hard Mode primals).

I understand that yeah, not everyone cares about the lore or the story, but Final Fantasy has always put a lot of importance on their story. I do wonder how they will keep up locking expansions behind the between patches' content. I'm sure that once the game reaches 5.0 and 6.0, new players starting out will probably find all the quests extremely overwhelming, and get burnt out quickly. I think it's fine to leave them there for those that want to progress through each expansion and the between patches, but adding an option like an hour-long cutscene/movie summary of the events is also not a bad idea for those that want to get through so much content quickly. I don't mind the quests because I love the story, but having an option to do either or is something the devs should consider the more the game grows.

The MSQ slog is real, and pretty much the only thing hurts my pitch to friends to "abandon game X and come to FFXIV". It needs some serious pruning, and I'd think it wouldn't be that bad to simply eliminate some irrelevant fetch pieces and merge some others (so that all the cutscenes don't have to change). The rewards and XP for the consolidated quests could just include the rewards of the pieces that get dropped or merged. I'll get through it because I'm enjoying the game overall, but recruiting less committed (or more time constrained) friends is dicey in the current state of the MSQ.

The main reason people quit FFXIV is boredom from the never ending tome grind and stale cloned instance repeat cycle. While housing is attractive to some players changing or improving it is hardly going to impact the game's population. Every time I see someone leave its b/c the same reason, by day 2 of each week they are capped on scriptures and collectable scripts, their WT journals and weeklys are done in general and they are left standing around for the next 5 days.

Yes they announced there would be new housing in 4.0 - perhaps in Ishgard some are guessing - but that doesn't preclude adding extra neighborhoods to the instances they have without waiting half a year or more.

Ability to play around with houses (including some of the new things they added such as fish tanks) shouldn't be so limited on many servers so that almost the only way to get a plot if you aren't checking the housing zones 24/7 is to pay a player to abandon his or hers which may violate the TOS.

If they can't add more instances without a real problem that's one thing but I see no reason to make housing so very hard to get otherwise. Telling new players they need to grind for money or levels is one thing - I am NOT suggesting relaxing the level or GC requirements - but telling them "all taken too bad" is a needless discouragement.

Isn't housing ingame already?
If you mean Ishgard housing, that will come with 4.0, i guess

housing isnt anything else than just another place to afk after capping tomes. I dont think, that it will increase the player numbers

I would be happier if they used the manpower and hardware resources on bigger/more maps/dungeons than more housing wards. Its a waste of time because its never going to be enough.
The system should've been houses are for high ranking FCs only and everyone else only gets a personal room.

No, less focus on things that don't matter to the overall gameplay and more refining of systems that do matter is what brings people back. ESO was awful now they've fine tuned a lot of the combat and the game feels much stronger, for instance I'm a level 10 dragon knight, my skills and stats give off such great feeling, where as in 14 when I pop a tank buff I don't feel that buff being activated. Aside from skills feeling much better, the MSQ is so quick in ESO that it's actually enjoyable, I can finish one MSQ walk to the town and be visited during my journey back that the next MSQ is open. Before the game took ages for the MSQ to open up each mission it was so dragged out it became an afterthought to exploring the world. It was very close to how 14 has its story flow, a lot of pointless quests that go A to B, pick up item X take to location Y, kill add at X location, run dungeon now or primal fight.

Honestly housing as is clashes a bit with the games lore at times it's a very hard to overlook, recall the end of 2.X when we thought the Sultana was killed, the Brass Blades were looking for us, but we owned a house and could go freely into and out of it, this was especially laughable if you owned a house in the Goblet. Granted ya you could go back into Ul Dah after this and it breaks the game, 14 needs less of this and craft a story that actually changes the world as we progress within the current story. For instance not even 3.0 does this, but we had Nidhogg preparing a massive assault, so why was the dragon presence so minimal in 3.0? Wouldn't a dragon seeking blood be sending out hordes to randomly attack us in the field? Nothing feels important in this game, which is hurting the integrity of the games foundation.

People don't want to keep playing a game that doesn't feel important nor as impactful as it should be. If SE wants to bring back people and keeping them hooked, the game needs to feel it's growing with the player and not staying stagnant, pushing forward and challenging the player is the only way this game can grow and foster more players. Adding more of X,Y and Z content that has issues that they haven't fixed yet isn't going to solve anything, it would make things so much more worse.

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Originally Posted by Felis

Isn't housing ingame already?

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Not for anyone who wasn't around with millions of gil in the initial land rush or don't camp the housing sales board 24/7 to try to grab one of the very few 'demolitions'.

SE DESIGNED the housing system to only be available to 0.000001% of players, in a game which is the follow-on from a 14-year-old game where EVERY CHARACTER gets a hose FOR FREE the moment they enter the world.

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And no, Apartments are not housing, they're a very poor substitute for what you can do with them compared to even a Small Cottage.